Astute observations by John Gruber on the state of the cord-free iOS device, the post PC era and what’s to come.

While the whole thing is good, there are two standout quotes:

I like MobileMe a lot, and it’s been very reliable for me for a few years now. But, at $99/year, it’s not something most iOS users have, and thus, most iOS users don’t get over-the-air syncing of calendars, contacts, and bookmarks. That’s not competitive today.

I love MobileMe for the reasons, AND ONLY for the reasons that Gruber states here. There’s simply no better way for me to sync my bookmarks, contacts, calendars, keychains… It works great, I never have to think about it and I couldn’t be happier. This is the only reason I pay for MobileMe. I use iDisk only very rarely, never use the web hosting services and only use MobileMe email services because they exist as part of my account, not because I need them.

…those third-party iOS developers that are depending upon Dropbox — there’s a veritable cottage industry of Dropbox text editors alone — have a far better syncing experience than Apple’s own creative apps. The iPad versions of the iWork suite and GarageBand are exquisite apps — easily some of the best-designed user experiences for creative software ever made. But the process of getting, say, a slide deck created in Keynote on your iPad open in Keynote on your iMac is downright antediluvian.

Antediluvian is a nice word, and anybody that reads Gruber’s Twitter feed knows that he’s not a man accustomed to using nice words. I’ll say here and now that Pages, which is a stunningly beautiful iOS app and a wonderful word processing program, has barely been used on my iPad by virtue of the simple fact that there is NO document syncing. There is only COPYING to and from WebDAV servers and iTunes. For anyone doing anything real, this renders the app absolutely useless. Apple should be embarrassed.

Unfortunately, Pages has some gaping holes that suck the life out of what would otherwise be a stellar app. The largest of these holes is file sharing, which is handled so poorly that it makes or breaks the possibility of using Pages for iPad as a business tool. While there are several options for getting your documents into and out of Pages, none are easy or recognizes that simple file sharing between your Mac and iPad are essential.

This problem remains, but it never should have existed in the first place.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.?

John Gruber has, as usual, nailed down some excellent points in his detailed look at the new iPhone 4.

…it’s more than just the pixel resolution — it’s that the LCD is so much closer to the surface of the glass. Like pixels on glass rather than pixels under glass. This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this.?

I saw my first iPhone 4 in the wild just a few days ago and what Gruber says about the display is 100% correct. The difference is immediately noticeable, even from a distance away. The nearness of the pixels to the surface of the screen and the overall quality of the display itself combine to make the new iPhone something completely different and completely delicious.

Both aesthetically and tactilely, the iPhone 4’s glass back is very pleasing. It has a 2001-monolith-like symmetry. But as a heavy iPhone user since day one, I’m finding it slightly disconcerting. I’ve always carried my iPhone the same way: front right pants pocket, with the glass toward my body, so that if my leg hits something or something hits my leg, the back of the iPhone would take the impact, not the glass. Now it’s glass on both sides, and what keeps happening is that I reach into my pocket to take it out, my fingers feel the smooth glass facing out?.

I too keep my phone, glass face in, in my left pocket for the very same reasons, but I also wonder, being someone who will not have a new iPhone in his pocket until sometime after the first of next year, how easy it is to know if you have the phone face out or in by touch in your pocket. With my 3GS I can tell immediately if I’ve been a bonehead.

Re: the use of Helvetica Neue as iPhone 4’s system font, I love it. Helvetica Neue is my hands down favorite for everything I do right now.

Aesthetically, this change is a win. Helvetica is a great typeface; long-time DF readers know I’m a huge fan of it, and the choice to use it for the iPhone’s system font is one of my favorite decisions in Apple history. But Helvetica Neue, subtle though its differences are, is a nice improvement. It is a more Helvetica-y Helvetica.?

Great coverage, as always, by John Gruber.

(Note to self: you only get Twitter mentions by John Gruber if you talk crap about him. Next time say something salacious just to piss him off…)

This year, the emblematic session was titled â€œMac Programming for iPhone Developersâ€. Iâ€™m not even sure what to say about that, other than to confirm that anecdotal evidence suggests that new-to-Apple iPhone developers are indeed very much interested in developing for the Mac now, too.

On the whole, there was a palpable sense that the iPhone is a peer to the Mac in Appleâ€™s eyes. This isnâ€™t about counting how many sessions were devoted to each. Nor is it an indication that the Mac as a platform is slowing. Quite the opposite in fact â€” Apple is selling more Macs than ever, and, knock on wood, thereâ€™s a strong consensus amongst developers that Snow Leopard is going to be the best release of Mac OS X yet. Itâ€™s simply that for however fast the Mac is growing, the iPhone is growing far faster.

He goes on to say that by 2011 he thinks it’s going to be obvious that,

Just now working my way through the podcast associated with yesterday’s posted quote from John Gruber. In the podcast both Gruber and Mann talk about who their target audience is. Mann said that he imagined that, “one perfect reader,” who everything he posted was geared toward, then Gruber piped in with a slightly more Onanistic point of view. He said that, in essence, he writes for himself.